


Barometer

by katharinewrites



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 00:43:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/591506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katharinewrites/pseuds/katharinewrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fluffy angsty nonsense where Harry has a headache while Zayn's ailment is his heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Barometer

It starts out as a pressure at Harry's temples in the mornings. It is nothing intense, not like the brain-jostling headache he comes to anticipate after a long night of grain liquor, low-lit clubs and girls that giggle when he whispers vulgar fantasies in their ears and pant when he acts them out.

This is a pressure that is constant and feels like his head is cradled in hands whose fond embrace has become violent after a misunderstanding. It's a nuisance that is not unendurable enough to say anything to anyone other than the hotel concierge who brings him paracetamol at his request. He downs two tablets with the avarice of a dying man before Louis pops into his room to tell him that the vans downstairs are waiting to shuttle them off to another fan-courting appearance.

"You all right?" Louis asks, glancing at the medicine bottle.

"Fine," Harry says. The tablets rattle as he sets the bottle down. "Head felt a bit weird but I'm fine now."

Louis nods, accepting the answer for now, and holds the door open for Harry to pass. As Harry walks through the door frame, Louis ruffles his curls and gives him a smile that barely masks his concern. In recent weeks this is the only place they allow any themselves any display of brotherly affection--in the privacy that closed doors and essential personnel passes allow--where their actions aren't perverted and twisted through a Larry-lens by a fan with editing software and a flair for the tragically romantic.

Harry smiles back broadly and hopes he doesn't let on that Louis' hand on his head feels like a tender beating.

( Collapse )

&&

 

The pressure in Harry's temples increases in frequency and duration with their schedule. The worldwide promotion for the new single is a marathon effort. Their last single topped out at a respectable #12 position on the UK top 40 chart, less respectably abroad, and the rolling fervor of the last year seems to have stagnated. The lower numbers the record label and management on edge; they chase down new promotional opportunities all over world, find new ways to repackage the album with bonus releases that should have remained unreleased. The idea that this song must be the one to restart the mania is the singular thought on everyone's mind. None of the boys dare admit it aloud but they all feel the twin apparitions, irrelevancy and indifference, snap at their heels. 

Harry doesn't mind the endless appearances and interviews like some of the other boys do, like Zayn does. Harry can sense the inklings of Zayn's growing discomfort in the middle of their twentieth appearance that week. Zayn never says anything to suggest it--speaking frankly of feelings would not be Zayn, not when feelings can be hidden behind an aloof veneer--but Harry notices the way he lets the other boys answer questions, how he runs his middle finger against the underside of his bottom lip over and over.

Zayn's relationship with the media cycles through moods like the seasons. During the interviews earlier in the week, his attitude has all the buoyancy of spring; his responses are witty, and his camaraderie with the boys is playful, nearly whimsical. But as the week goes on, as the interviews become perfunctory exchanges of rote information, his demeanor falls and takes on the chilly notes of winter. It's the chill that sticks around longest, takes Zayn more time to recover from, more time away from the band and the media.

So when Zayn angles his microphone away from his face, Harry knows it's more than fleeting boredom with the same questions in differently ordered words. Harry wonders how long this winter will last, secretly hopes for Indian summer.

After the cameras shut off and the interviewer's plastic smile is replaced with apathetic blankness, Harry stands too quickly from his perch on a stool and falls over. The stool comes crashing after him, connecting with his shin. The succeeding quiet is deafening, the kind of quiet that always accompanies the awkward unexpectedness of a fall.

Niall is closest to him, offers him a hand and a quizzical smirk. Harry takes it, fights through the wave of dizziness that hits him and hoists himself up. He doesn't miss the low-level alarm that passes on the boys' faces. 

"What?" he asks, snorting at himself. They don't answer and return to their chatter though Louis lingers on his face half a second longer.

Harry rubs his aching shin and fights the urge to press a hand to his head, refusing to call attention to it even though the pressure in his head ratchets up another level. 

 

&&

 

The pressure turns into full-fledged pounding on the ride somewhere between a club in Paris and their hotel.

Liam and Harry are crammed inside a taxi with two women pulled from the shadows of the dance floor. They're beautiful with pouting lips that frame each of their French-seasoned utterances. They are older, not the typical girls they usually find on tours, the ones that are covert fans, carefully trying to seem unimpressed by their notoriety while squealing energy nearly bursts from every orifice. Harry doesn't particularly prefer one age group to the other but Liam craves the maturity.

"They calm me down," Liam yelled into Harry's ear one night, months ago, over the drunken din of of a London club. They were a little over four drinks into one of their first outings together after his breakup. Liam's eyes kept circling back to a girl who gave him pointed looks over her friend's shoulder. "I like younger girls but I fall for older girls."

Harry didn't tell him that twenty minutes ago the same girl had accosted him on his way to the bathroom. When he brushed her off--she was too eager, too short, too chubby--with a charming lie, "My friend thinks you're beautiful," she concentrated all her flirtatious efforts on Liam. 

Harry considered Liam's words over the rim of his glass, uncomfortable with alcohol-soaked confessions, no matter how benign. "Older girls? That's supposed to be my thing," he said.

Liam snorted, remembering the roles they play in the media, characterizations long ago decided and immutable. "Right. Forgot."

"But I can't fall for anyone," Harry added, in a tone he hoped sounded like pride but sounded regrettably close to melancholy.

The words were swallowed by an eruption of screams from the dance floor as the previous song dissembled, disintegrated, reassembled itself as the the most popular dance track of the moment. Liam didn't hear. His face was turned toward the girl, actively staring at her with a wide grin on his face. Harry followed Liam's gaze as the girl's friend turned to look over her shoulder. She was attractive enough, though not overwhelmingly so. She'll do, he thought.

"Shall we...?" Harry asked Liam, using his cup to motion toward the girls.

"Warm them up for me first?" Liam asked.

"Yeah," Harry said with a shake of his head. It was a common request from Liam when they chatted up girls, a leftover vestige of bashfulness from the days when anonymity and teenage awkwardness ruled their confidence. Once Harry leads in with an adorably witty repartee that places them firmly in the palm of his hands, Liam allows himself to relax, to laugh and smile, make lingering contact with his hands and lips.  
It plays out similarly in Paris with Liam making eye contact after Harry rebuffs the advances of one girl. This time Harry actually wants the girl's friend. She says her name, Cosette, with mauve lips rounding in a perfect circle over the first vowel. Harry immediately feels a tightening in his pants.

She says she is a model and Harry can't tell if "model" means that she has been been on a runway or featured on an obscure fashion blog. He doesn't care. All he cares about is the way she let him run his tongue against her neck and slide his fingers underneath the hem of her skirt after a short exchange of basic demographic information. While they wait for Liam and Paul to secure the ride back to the hotel, they lean against a wall in the alleyway, clutching fist-fulls of each other's hair, clothes. He brushes his hand against the damp patch of her underwear. The implications of that damp patch and the memory of those perfectly rounding lips rival each other for supremacy in his thoughts.

Then the pounding begins as they roll away from a brief stop and disrupts all base thought, every part of his head throbbing in symphony. Harry pulls away from the probing kiss he shares with her and furrows his brow. The pain subsides for an instant but it charges back with a vengeance. Harry frees one of his hands from its place between her legs and leans back against the car seat, hoping the respite will help. Cosette snuggles closer into him, kisses the back of his neck and the side of his chin.

"Stop for a minute," he tells her. He blinks hard twice then rubs his eyes.

She clucks her disapproval and pulls her head away a negligible distance but her hands don't stop roaming down his torso, over the seat of his jeans. For every spike of pleasure her touch coaxes from his body, his head retaliates with stronger pounding.

Behind her, he can make out the slow undulating movements of Liam's head in the midst of an open mouthed kiss with Cosette's friend. Their noisy, smacking lips are gunshots that echo off the car's roof and windows, barreling straight through his head. He wants them to stop, wants everything outside of his head to cease, to give him an undisturbed moment to get a handle on his pain. 

Cosette begins to mewl when her touches go unacknowledged, unreturned. Through the window, he sees the hotel within sight; its lit sign looks like a mirage. He thinks of the paracematol tucked away in his suitcase and feels the relief of a desert wanderer before he resigns his lips to Cosette's. 

 

&&

 

"I miss you," she says, at the end of a litany of cooed affections.

Zayn stops pacing up and down the hotel hallway for a moment. "I miss you, too, babe."

Perrie doesn't immediately respond but Zayn can nearly hear her smile over the phone. He starts to pad up the hallway again.

Whenever Zayn gets a call from Perrie he leaves his hotel room and wanders the hallway outside. It's not exactly a courtesy to his roommate--in tonight's case, Louis--not exactly to spare him the gory sentimentalities liable to exit Zayn's mouth. It's more of a security blanket for himself. Zayn doesn't mind showing affection, he constantly shows affection to the others. The showing comes naturally to him. It is the talking about it, the sweetness in the words and the vulnerability in the listening that he can't allow himself to do with an audience.

"How is Paris?" she finally asks. He can sense the slight tremor in her voice that suggests the true meaning of the question. How are the pretty girls? Are they prettier than me? Has one caught your eye? Are you cheating on me? The longer their separations are, the more tremulous her voice becomes.

"It's beautiful if a bit boring this time around," he tells her, hoping he has chosen adjectives that are neutral enough to pacify her doubts. "We've barely got any time to ourselves. How is New York?"

Little Mix's promotion nearly mirrors One Direction's in scope and magnitude. The girls' management had finally decided to try and break the States, hot on the heels of One Direction's massive success. Thus far, the results have been less impressive. While America always loves its roving bands of teenage, British troubadours, singing songs with all the short-sighted promises of young love, it's cold-shouldered to their female counterparts. The indifference only causes more appearances and promotion for the group. It seems like every time Zayn talks to Perrie she is in some new city America with her band mates trying to drum up support for their album.

"It's okay," she says. "It's pretty amazing here, actually, but I just want to crawl up in a ball and sleep for the rest of my life."

"Me too," he tells her as he reaches the end of the hallway and makes an about-face to trek it once more.

Perrie says something but he can't hear it over a flurry of activity coming from the elevator. Liam and a girl are careening up the hallway, bumping from one wall to the other in an effort to get to Liam's room. Zayn narrowly side steps one of their collisions with the wall that leaves Liam pressed against it while the girl kisses his neck and snakes a hand down the front of his pants. Liam's eyes flutter and he makes eye contact with Zayn.

"Zayn," he says with an acknowledging nod. Liam valiantly fights the dopey grin forming on his face.

"Liam," Zayn responds, but Liam has already closed his eyes as the girl nips his earlobe with her lips. They continue their messy, bumping course to Liam's door and slip into his room.

Seeing Liam almost makes him wish he had gone out with them tonight. He misses the manic circus that unfolds upon returning from a night out, when every stupid idea sounds better than the previous one.

"What was all that?" Perrie asks, the tremor entering her voice again.

"Liam. He's drunk," he says.

Perrie replies but he can't hear her over another set of footsteps and commotion.

He sees Harry lurching up the hallway with his head down while a girl follows after him, hobbling in her heels as she tries to keep up with his long strides.

"Harry," she calls after him, her accent reversing all the consonants into her pharynx. "Harry, wait!"

She is giggling despite the dogged efforts she has to make to catch up with him. Harry ignores her, keeps moving to his room quickly. He locks eyes with Zayn but offers nothing by way of greeting. His face is pale and drawn, a stark contrast to his usual goofy delirium after a night out when he is steps from his room with a pretty girl in tow.

Zayn almost says something but lets it play out. There will be plenty of time to find out what's wrong later, if Harry doesn't fuck out his troubles on this girl. 

"Harry? Harry!" the girl keeps yelling. "Harry!"

Harry reaches his room, fiddles with the key card and enters. The girl barely gets to the door before it swings shut.

"Sorry, babe, what?" Zayn says to Perrie when he realizes he is still on the phone. 

"Seriously what is all that?" she asks. He hates that this is causing the panicked strain in her voice.

"Nothing. Some of the lads just came back, don't worry," he reassures her.

Niall exits Harry's room a few minutes later, half dressed and yawning. He stumbles toward Zayn.

"Can I have your bed until Harry's done?" he asks sleepily. 

The request is not strange but it is an unexpected one. The boys rarely displace each other for sexual encounters unless its participants are in an established relationship. Harry least of all requires privacy, realizing profane fantasies with girls when Zayn was less than four feet away several times. Months ago, Harry had put on a show of embellished moans and incomprehensible body positions that had nearly distracted Zayn's own bed mate before Zayn had increased his efforts and licked her until she screamed for mercy.

Zayn nods. "Is he all right?"

Niall shrugs and moves past to Zayn's room.

"Zayn, why am I on the phone with you right now?" he hears her say.

"Babe, I'm so sorry," he murmurs. Her shuddering, wet breaths answer him. He thinks he would be better at this by now, at making her believe his fidelity, at sustaining this thing that feeds on long phone calls from opposite ends of the earth and fleeting encounters jammed with years worth of physical and spiritual bonding.

But he's not.

"I love you," he tells her over and over though he's tired and he knows she is too. 

It's the talking, and sometimes the lying, about affections that he can't allow himself to do in front of an audience.

 

&&

 

Harry remembers four things: a full-body shudder as he vomits, indistinct French words, a metallic-tasting wetness on his mouth and Zayn's hand rubbing his back. Though he cannot visually confirm that it is Zayn's hand, the musky remnants of his cologne and tobacco confirm it olfactorily.

Zayn is asking Harry something and all he can muster is a woeful moan that was meant to be a surrender but sounds like no words he has ever heard before.

Harry feels Zayn's fingers touch the tender spot on his lips lightly. They pull away when he flinches and makes another unintelligible sound.

Harry remembers one last thing, that while he recalls putting the tablets on his tongue, lashing out at Cosette and the dizzying wave of nausea there is a gap in his memory of getting to the toilet, where Cosette's gone or the back story of the throbbing pain on his lip.

He leans away from the toilet and wilts into Zayn torso. Zayn snakes an arm around Harry's waist and traces soothing lines over his head and arms.

They sit like this for a while. When some of the fog in Harry's head dissipates, he realizes that Zayn has been asking, "What did you take? What the fuck did you take?" on shaky breaths.

Harry finally finds the words, the right order of sounds, to tell him.

 

&&

 

Zayn keeps Perrie on the phone for twenty more minutes, despite her protests to let it and let her go. He entertains her complaints about their precarious arrangement, countering with romantic vows. Rising noises from Harry's room force him to seek quiet at the end of the hall, where the sounds won't reach Perrie and undo all the work he has put in to establish this emotional equilibrium. He curls onto a window sill farthest away from Harry's, looking out like he can find Perrie's face beyond all that starry darkness.

"Your friend is a real shit."

Zayn turns and the girl Harry brought back is roughly putting on her shoes, checking her balance every so often, until both are firmly on her feet. She glares at him with such ferocity, Zayn briefly wonders if he has done anything to wrong her in a past life.

"What?" he asks.

"Harry," she says. She digs into her clutch, retrieves a phone. "He wasted my time! Doesn't he want to fuck? Doesn't even offer me some of the pills he took. Then he vomits everywhere? What a fucking child. He didn't even notice when I was leaving."

The girl lists off Harry's sins to Zayn with no reservations, as though Zayn is a girlfriend that she is recounting her nocturnal exploits to over brunch.

One part gives him pause.

"And who's that Zayn?" Perrie asks. Her voice is hollow.

"Hold on," he tells her. He pulls the phone away from his ear, uses it to gesture toward the French girl.

"What did Harry take?"

"Some pills? I don't know. He ignored me the whole time," she says as she hits the button for the elevator.

Zayn has known Harry to indulge in a few deep pulls on the odd joint or blow a line with destructive company but unidentifiable pills are something entirely different.

"I'll call you back," Zayn says into his phone.He hears her pleading his name before they are disconnected.

"What pills?" he asks more forcefully.

She gives him a nasty shrug, all creased brow, cocked head and sneering expression. Her ear and shoulder cradle her phone and after a hesitation she starts prattling in French. He struggles to recall any words he had learned from a half-attended French class from his school years but isn't able to glean anything as she disappears into the elevator.

He springs off of the window sill and rushes down the hall to Harry's room.

"Harry!" He knocks with the side of a fist in an urgent pattern. He tries the door knob, stupidly, even though he knows it won't give. "Harry?"

Zayn doesn't get a response and he runs down the hallway to his room. He misses the keycard slot twice before finally fitting it in properly. His hands shake as he twists the handle. Louis and Niall are fast asleep, snores and the warmth of their sleeping body heat permeating the air. He approaches Niall who is sprawled across his bed, belly down. Zayn is greatful Niall hasn't twisted himself in the sheets as he quietly searches the night stand by the light of his phone's screen.

Niall stirs. He raises his head off the pillow at Zayn's looming form.

"Need your card," Zayn whispers, willing calm into his words.

Niall flops back down on the pillow but tilts his hip to expose a pocket of his shorts. Zayn extricates the key and rushes back to Harry's room.

It looks ordinary, no dramatically overturned bottle of pills or unidentifiable baggies or needles like he had almost come to expect. The stench of sickness is prominent, grows headier as he moves toward the bathroom. He finds Harry curled over the toilet, with a rivulet of blood running from his bottom lip. Harry's head turns at the sound of Zayn's entrance but his face bears no sign of recognition. Zayn is on his knees immediately clutching Harry against him and checking his face and eyes for signs of something beyond the frightening vacuousness.

"Fuck, Harry, did you take something? What the fuck what did you take? What the fuck did you take?" 

He considers calling an ambulance, debating with himself whether this is alcohol-induced sickness or something more nefarious like the girl suggested, when Harry finally responds.

"Headache," Harry says against Zayn's chest, his voice gravely and crackling. "My head was killing me so I took some Panadol."

"You scared me," Zayn says, aiming for nonchalance but landing among hysterical relief.

Harry angles his head to look at Zayn with wide eyes and an indefinable expression. His tongue darts out to wet his lips and he hisses as it makes contact with the tear. 

"Did she hit you?" Zayn teases. He cradles Harry's chin in his thumb and forefingers. Crusted blood borders the cut and there's shiny hints of red but it is not actively bleeding anymore.

Harry grows solemn. "I don't know how that happened."

Zayn looks down at the toilet, notices a swatch of blood against the rim of and draws conclusions but he can't resist another taunt. "So she did hit you." 

Harry scrabbles his limbs and shoves at Zayn in response. He tries to get up, away from the fetid odor of vomit collecting at the bottom of the toilet bowl, but his limbs can't coordinate the movements and he slides against the bathroom tile.

"Hey, hey, I've got you," Zayn says. He braces Harry against himself to help lift him. Zayn mercifully flushes the toilet before they make a slow shuffling path toward Harry's bed. If Zayn doubts Harry's explanation, the proof of it lays on top of his tangled bed sheets. Zayn picks up the bottle, surprised at its lightness given the otherwise pristine condition of the packaging.

"How long has your head been hurting?" 

Harry gives him a meaningful look but answers, "Two weeks."

Zayn tries to remain expressionless, tries to beat back the alarm bells in his mind. "Have you told anyone?" 

Harry doesn't say anything and Zayn takes it as an implicit "no." Harry flops down on the side of his bed, spaghetti-limbed. At Harry's somber expression, Zayn instinctively jabs a finger into the edge of his mouth, trying to coax a dimple from hiding. 

"You got sick from drinking. It's not the end of the world," Zayn says softly. 

"I'm scared," Harry admits after a beat. "What if something's wrong with me?" He looks up at Zayn with terror alighting his green eyes.

"Well does your head hurt now?" Zayn asks. 

Harry contemplates his question, looking off at the distance beyond Zayn's shoulder. "No, not anymore." 

Zayn pivots and flops down on the bed next to him. "Then you're fine. This whole thing's got everyone worn out, we all feel shit."

The reassurance softens Harry's face and body language, lifts some of the weight of the world from his shoulders. He weakly laughs at himself. "This tour is so crazy I'm inventing mysterious terminal illnesses."

"You're better at this than I am," Zayn says. 

He throws an arm over Harry's shoulders, rubs the side of his arm. Harry rests his head in the curve of Zayn's neck and shoulder. 

Zayn's sweatpants buzz, interrupting the companionable silence. He's nearly shocked by the call, unsure of the caller's identity until he sees Perrie's name and the cropped picture of her blowing a kiss that she'd taken after stealing his phone one night. He catches Harry glancing at the screen, averting his eyes when he realizes who is calling. Zayn lets the buzzing run its course, then replaces it in his pocket. He refuses to think about the implications of this choice, resorts to undressing Harry who complies easily. 

"Bed, yeah?" he asks Harry. 

"Yeah," Harry says, lifting his hips off the bed so Zayn can pull his jeans down his legs. He kicks out of his boots as Zayn pulls the pants down his shins. Zayn's eyes lingers on the purple and blue ring marring Harry's left leg. 

"The stool," Harry offers before Zayn can ask. 

Zayn drops Harry's pants indelicately on the floor next to the bed and starts in on Harry's shirt, flipping the hem and lifting it up over his head. Harry seeks out an edge of the sheets and slips under them in one fluid movement.

"Where's Niall?" he asks finally noting his absence. 

"My room," Zayn answers, tucking the sheets around Harry's body, suddenly obsessed with preventing cold from seeping in. 

"So, you'll stay here?" Zayn wants to hear hopefulness in Harry's words, fights the urge to read too much into the request.

"I can go get him if you'd rather he was here," Zayn says, stroking his face with all faux-longing he can bear.  
Harry grabs his wrist. "Stay," he pleads. 

Zayn's only sign of accord is to start undressing himself with his free hand. Harry watches Zayn ease his pants over his hip, his fingers still clutching Zayn's wrist. As Zayn reaches for his shirt, Harry finally releases him, self-conscious eyes darting everywhere other than Zayn's body. Zayn divests himself of his shirt, letting his clothes mingle with Harry's on the floor. When he's left in his underwear he turns to Niall's bed but decides against it, untucks a corner of a Harry's sheet and slips inside. 

Harry sidles close to Zayn and he allows it, even though the proximity of another person usually makes it hard for him to sleep through the night. Zayn's unsure whether it's Harry or himself that needs the contact more. 

Harry reaches for a remote tossed on the night stand and turns on the television. The blank screen gives way to a man and woman caught in a lusty embrace. Music heavy on dramatic saxophone solos plays over the action, complimenting the soft focus camera work.

Harry only clicks away once Zayn chuckles and says, "Seriously, Haz?"

The channel-changing is aimless. Every time Zayn thinks Harry has found something to lull them to sleep he turns to something new. It is only when he lands on a brightly animated cartoon that he stops, sets the remote down, turns out the light and curls deeper under the sheets, closer to Zayn. 

"This isn't even in English," Zayn says. 

Harry shrugs, eyes fixed on the screen. 

They watch for a few minutes, enthralled by a talking frog and his band of courageous animal friends partaking in fantastical adventures Zayn and Harry can't fully comprehend. Zayn thinks the mischievous cat reminds him of Louis while the noble hippopotamus is terribly reminiscent of Liam. Niall takes the form of the idealistic bird. Zayn wonders if that would leave him and Harry to occupy the frog's character. He sees shades of them in the frog's honor and his bravery in the midst of self-doubt. Zayn finds himself liking the idea of inhabiting one character, one soul with Harry.

Zayn distantly hears his phone begin to buzz again. He'll deal with it, with the cooling of relations and the widening rift, later. For now he will it ring and enjoy the comma of warmth Harry's body provides, under the television's fluorescent glow.


End file.
